References & Citations

Bookmark

Statistics > Applications

Title:
Archetypal Athletes

Abstract: Discussions on outstanding---positively and/or negatively---athletes are
common practice. The rapidly grown amount of collected sports data now allow to
support such discussions with state of the art statistical methodology. Given a
(multivariate) data set with collected data of athletes within a specific
sport, outstanding athletes are values on the data set boundary. In the present
paper we propose archetypal analysis to compute these extreme values. The
so-called archetypes, i.e., archetypal athletes, approximate the observations
as convex combinations. We interpret the archetypal athletes and their
characteristics, and, furthermore, the composition of all athletes based on the
archetypal athletes. The application of archetypal analysis is demonstrated on
basketball statistics and soccer skill ratings.